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The end is near for SEO!

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

As the importance of Search Engine Optimisation gets home to the masses, the amount of good high quality search engine optimised sites increases. The potential profit margins of a good SEO site heavily outweigh the margins of a successful PPC campaign.

Eventually, every man and his dog will have a good high quality, relevant search engine optimised website. Adding that to the fact that Google appear to not be making very many serious long term changes to their search engine algorithm, where does the optimisation stop?

Will we hit a point where everybody has equally optimised sites?

If Google does not change their algorithm and sites are getting built automatically with good SEO practice, would the SEO industry as a whole collapse?

UPDATE FROM RAND: This post was accidentally moved to the home page - our mistake :) It's going back to YOUmoz now.

40 Comments

The level of SEO knowledge on a local 'client' level is way off base compared to what can be done so there is still much work to be done.

The dangerous thing at the moment is that many more people have entered the SEO market with little knowledge and they are getting work based on badly set key performance indicators set around the ignorance of clients.

I also agree that SEO has moved on, including online social interaction for companies. That is still quite a hard concept to sell to clients who still like to advertise in yellow pages and have five year old websites.

It also still amazes me that clients wll willingly spend thousands on a brochure but have tiny budgets for websites and online marketing.

THere's no way the amount of SEO's out there today could tackle the amount of sites that need SEO assistance. It would take a huge SEO media craze all at once to even let people know what they would need and start working through all the sites out there that need quality design, usability and promotion implementations. I don't see Google staying the same during all that, do you?

exactly. the amount of work necessary to get legacy sites into competitive shape would itself be enormous, to say nothing of the number of sites that continue to be built with little / no / bad SEO oversight.

in a market that has infinite variability, even thinking about a future of homogeneous "equally optimized sites" is pretty ridiculous.

I look forward to the glorious day (very soon, apparently) where all websites follow white-hat best practices, are built with the user in mind, and have rational, effective business models. On that happiest of days I will thank the Tooth Fairy for all the cash, buy Santa a drink, marvel as pigs learn to fly, and rejoice as global warming is counteracted by the freezing-over of Hell.

I also think this post leaves out the importance of doing good design/user experience AND SEO in tandem (something which SEOmoz happens to be very good at, for example, but other top SEO companies are not).

Let's say we do get to this point, where "the masses" finally get SEO'd--users are going to choose among the top 10/20/X sites with what will likely be very similar, relevant content.

The question is, which of those SEO'd sites is going to create the best user experience? That will be the site that will win in this situation (as farfetched as the situation may be). Ranking is not the end goal of SEO, it's conversion and revenue.

A more likely herald of the decline of SEO is Google, largest engine by search volume, buying an SEO company. Oh wait! That just happen $3.1 billion dollars and Google has you by the short hairs. Does it matter whether you are good at your job – not anymore.

If your clients have a sweet tooth for the Google Rank you just lost them to Performics. I want a piece of THAT anti-trust suit.

Philo began laying out his vision for what television could become. Above all else... television would become the world's greatest teaching tool. Illiteracy would be wiped out. The immediacy of television was the key. As news happened viewers would watch it unfold live; no longer would we have to rely on people interpreting and distorting the news for us. We would be watching sporting events and symphony orchestras. Instead of going to the movies, the movies would come to us. Television would also bring about world peace. If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past. ~Evan I. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor, about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television

Well said - when the NHS was launched it was thought that it would end up getting cheaper to run as no-one would get sick any more.

As a Brit, I should also add that Philo didn't actually invent television - he sort of capped it all off - there were lots of people who invented some stage of it, including the Scotsman John Logie Barid....

one site is ranked first... than the other optimizes... then the other is ranked first... then the engine changes the algorithm... then the first site optimizes and ranks first... then the consumer changes his searching habbits, looking for different words, looking for longer tail... and i can go on and on and on...

and there is not only one search engine... and there are not only 2 websites... and there in not only one customer and only one market...

Exactly. The average searcher still takes 11 minutes to find what they're looking for. I'm pretty sure the engines, the advertisers and the SEOs aren't gonna sit comfortably on that statistic. I'd say once the search industry as a whole has gotten that number down to about 11 seconds, then we can say things are getting tight and competition is downright brutal.

I agree with most everyone else on here that at this point that there really is no end in site for the SEO industry at this point.

I still see a vast amount of untapped markets still out there when it comes to harnessing the power of the web. With that in mind I don't know how the SEO industry could not continue to thrive as competition between existing and new businesses online increases dramatically.

I was thinking of SEO being dead just the other day - but how can it ever be?

I have been doing this for almost a decade and everytime someone thinks they've go it the bloody goalposts move which will keep us guys in bon bons for many years to come.

I stumbled upon (pardon the pun) SEO before it had a name and with a small wedding DJ website i had in San Francisco - I turned nothing into a lovely early part time retirement and honestly don't see it going away.

Hilarious! I just attended an arts event with dozens of small vendors, all of whom have websites and many of whom have been in business for years. Only of few of them had ever heard of search engine optimization. When I visited their websites, I discovered that many of them had home pages that didn't even mention their top products by name! Instead, most of the home pages were about their philosophy of business or focused on some oddly spelled proprietary names they had invented for their products (things like "Spa candalz" -- so no one searching for "candles" could ever find them!). SEO will be come universal -- right about the time that biz websites all have attractive colors, readable typefaces, and someone with common sense doing their marketing writing.

I honestly dont think the SEO industry will collapse. It seems like everyday, something is changing in this industry so the need for professionals is going to always be there. Just recently matt cutts has put a fight against paid links so although they may still work, in the future SEOs will have to be more creative in link aquisition which leads into the NEW SCHOOL of seo (smo, community leveraging).

SEO will never die but as an industry we will evolve and keep growing.

Something I post a lot about is SMO while using old school tactics in tandum.

I do however feel that to be known in the industry and not fall into the masses of the new wave of SEO advancement that you must have a blog and you must give away your secrets to continually be considered an authority in the industry.

Ok, it's like this. All things will NEVER be equal and even if all pages were perfectly optimized as far as on-page stuff is concerned, there is that nasty little element of links that you seem to forget. Links determine ranking, not just on-page lovey-dovey whitehat crap. Also, domain age can play a huge factor too, so it's not like some new site with no links and no age can come in and on-page-optimize their way to the top. Most of the time it takes some serious link building to rank for anything competitive.

Long story short, SEO won't die anytime soon and PPC isn't the best alternative for most sites anyway. To think otherwise is foolish.

As long as number of links matters in the ranking algorithm, SEO will exist. I would venture to argue that professional SEO will become more important as it becomes more and more difficult to compete.SEO: Everything Else is Just An Ad.

I wanted to know what their menu was before I walked all the way down there for lunch (10 minutes of crowd-plowing - not plesant).

I tried every search I could think of to find their own home site - not some other site getting ad money from them.

Could I heck.

If a chain of shops like Wasabi cannot be found, what home has a mom & pop and where the heck is this optomisation? It was flash but still - if it was equally optiomised I wouldn't have had to haul butt down there to discover I had to pay close to $15 (8 pounds) to get a decent portion.

end of SEO - ya right.

Please - you owe me a nickel and I'm going to collect one from everyone who says this so I can retire tomorrow.

The end of "SEO consultant" terminology may be going away (although extremely slowly compared to all the predictions), but there is no replacement for what I do (and what many other people who use and have used the term SEO consultant). I spend most of my time doing online marketing, web development, and a little online pr. Those have about a 0 chance of going away. Maybe I'll focus less on keywords and rankings as technology necessatates this, but the core job I do is becoming more important not less.

As competition rises, the ability to excute plans that set apart one particular website from the million other me toos becomes even more valuable.

I'm actually about to hire another web developer to help me on some huge projects, I'm creating a plan to change over the revenue model (and a create an entire new site with web 2.0 features) for a print magazine that needs to make the next steps in their transition.

I think it will be difficult for many SEO's to make the transisition into dealing with online marketing clients and project managing web development projects to ensure they are executed according to a targeted online marketing strategy.

The days of "I rank websites on Google" are being replaced with "I manage online marketing campaigns tageted at opening up new markets, increasing branding, exposure, and profit for my clients, and also "I build or project manage community driven websites with the goal of targeting niche marketplaces so my employers can have direct access to new audiences".

Those two things summarize what I'm currently working on. I never use the term SEO, although I do a lot of link building, etc that fall under what SEO means and use to mean.

Who will need search anymore??? When you need medical advice you go to WebMD, when you need weather you go to weather.com, when you need anything there will be an authoritative site.. so you search one time, find the killer site and then go direct there forever. Wikipedia will fill in for anything else that you need.

Go to google trends and you will find that search volume is dropping for lots of terms.

So, do not count on search for your long term traffic source.

People who now work as SEOs will be working for the content folks, the usability folks, or maybe for McDs.

EGOL, people like variety. When you want to read some good blogs you could go to a giant aggregator or massive authority, but most people (me included) would rather search through all the regular blogs and get some variety. With social media as another avenue for large amounts of traffic, there will still be a huge arena for the "little" guys to fight for traffic in search and social media.

Plus with modern web development you can go SUPER niche, so you can have an entire site devoted to a sub of a sub of a sub topic. Which can offer some personality and a stylized content delivery that large authority sites can't match.